Rashida Tlaib, my Congresswoman, beat her challenger 66-34 to win the nomination. Since this seat is heavily gerrymandered to be Democratic, she’ll easily win in November. Tlaib got national attention by demanding impeachment of the nasty guy the day she took the oath of office 18 months ago. I’m glad she gets another term.
Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist, beat incumbent Lacy Clay in a Missouri Congressional district that includes Ferguson. Clay, also black, had held the seat for 20 years and his father for 30, so this is a major upset. Bush’s big question about Clay:
When we were getting our butts kicked and I was maced in the face in Florissant a few weeks ago and people were getting beat on by police officers … did he show up the next day to say, ‘You can’t do this in my district, you can’t treat people this way?’ No, no.
Also in Missouri Amendment 2 passed. This expands Medicaid to another 230,000 residents. This is another state where the GOP refused to expand Medicaid and be partly funded by Obamacare. So this ballot proposal was to amend the state constitution to make sure the GOP couldn't overturn it. Missouri is also the fifth red state to expand Medicaid at the ballot box, following Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah.
The nasty guy has now blessed vote by mail in Florida. But only Florida. Certainly not Nevada. As Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos put it:
Huh. Nevada mail-in voting = Corrupt disaster. Florida mail-in voting = Great! What could possibly be going on here?
Oh, look at that—the Real Clear Politics average presently puts Joe Biden at a six-point advantage, with recent polling showing the race tightening some over the last several weeks.
Biden can still win without Florida, but Trump pretty much can't.
Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos quoted Politico:
Donald Trump’s all-out war on mail voting is backfiring in battleground states.
New private polling shared first with POLITICO showed that Republicans have become overwhelmingly concerned about mail balloting, which Trump has claimed without evidence, will lead to widespread voter fraud. A potentially decisive slice of Trump’s battleground-state base — 15 percent of Trump voters in Florida, 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 10 percent in Michigan — said that getting a ballot in the mail would make them less likely to vote in November.
Dworkin also quoted Ed Yong in The Atlantic to give us a summary of how we got to where we are:
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic…
The House GOP has decided on their slogan for the fall campaign. It is Renew, Restore, Rebuild.
Kerry Eleveld wrote:
Quite the admission.
Renew the American dream, restore our way of life, and rebuild the greatest economy ever! In other words, after four years of Trump—half of which included unified GOP control of government—the country is in horrific shape and we're here to help.
Ronald Ortman tweeted a reference to Sarah Kendzior’s book Hiding in Plain Sight – she quoted the nasty guy as saying he fantasizes about causing thousands of deaths and getting away with it. Ortman added:
Killing with impunity is a narcissist's ultimate validation.
After all that news you might need a fun cooking lesson right here (less than 2 minutes).
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